Five ways to help slow your heart rate when anxious

You wake as the sun rises in the morning; you feel the warmth of the animal skin covering your body as you lie on the mud floor of the hut you call home. Alongside you and next door, you hear other community members rousing, too. The birds sing in the trees that surround you. You get up and prepare yourself to hunt for food. There is nowhere to work here; your life’s purpose is to survive.

Finding food is intensely challenging, and you are the source of food for your animal cohabitants. Meat is rare, and it might take you and your hunting party days to arrive home with something to feed everyone. Your body must work efficiently to keep you safe from harm. Danger lurks everywhere, but your body is powerful. When your brain recognises an imminent threat, it will activate your fight or flight response, so you can run or fight. This innate lifesaving skill keeps you alive on your dangerous missions.

And then you come back to real life. Real life in your Western society, where there is very little threat to your life. Food comes from the supermarket down the road, and your next-door neighbour probably isn’t going to eat you.

Frustratingly, though, your brain does not differentiate between a threat to your life and a threat to your ego. It cannot tell the difference between real and imagery. It holds onto previous experiences and uses them to determine how to behave in the future. So, when you have a social engagement that feels a bit scary, or a presentation to give at work, your brain will react as it would when trapped by a killer animal.

Why does anxiety cause heart palpitations?

Anxiety is your body moving into a survival response. When your brain senses danger, or recognises that you are not meeting a core survival need, it activates the autonomic nervous system and releases motivator hormones such as adrenaline and noradrenaline.

These hormones mobilise you. They increase your heart rate, redirect blood towards your muscles, and sharpen your focus. Your heart beats faster because your body needs to mobilise.

Threat is not only something running towards you. It is also hunger, social disconnection, exhaustion, uncertainty, or the sense that something important is unresolved. For most of human history, survival depended on meeting these needs quickly. If you were separated from your group, low on food, or exposed to danger, your body needed to act. Motivator hormones exist to move you towards safety.

In the environment humans evolved in, mobilisation usually led to completion. You would find food. You would reconnect with your group. You would run, climb, build, or defend. Once you met the need or the danger passed, gratifier hormones followed. These settling chemicals bring relief, connection and satisfaction. They signal that the system can stand down. Your heart rate slows. Your breathing deepens. Balance returns.

In modern life, the threat is often social or psychological. It may be a work demand, financial pressure, relationship tension, or a quiet fear about the future. It may also be a subtle mismatch between what your body needs and how you are living. You still release motivator hormones, but there is often no clear physical completion.

Without completion, the body does not receive the gratifier signal it expects. The heart may continue to race because the system is still mobilised. The question is: what survival need might my body be highlighting right now, and what conditions would help it feel met so that settling can naturally follow?

How do I know if I have heart problems or anxiety?

There is no harm in a quick trip to the doctor to make sure your heart is in good working order. Anxiety is more common than you might think, but your GP will happily check your heart for you to make sure there is nothing wrong.

If your heart rate is quickened due to anxiety, you can use the following tricks to slow down your heart rate, help stop heart palpitations and feel more comfortable.

1. Breathing 

As per the previous example, when you breathe, make your exhale longer than your inhale to slow your heart rate.

2. Abdominal breathing 

Place one hand over your belly and the other on your chest. As you breathe in through your nose, allow the breath to move downwards so the hand on your belly rises first, rather than the one on your chest.

This is how your body naturally breathes when it feels safe. When you are asleep, resting, or deeply settled, your breath moves low and slow.

In an anxious state, the pattern changes. Motivator hormones prepare you for movement, so the muscles across your chest tighten to support running or fighting. Your breathing becomes higher and faster - this is your body preparing for action.

The difficulty is that if there is no physical completion, the tightness remains. High, shallow breathing can then increase sensations of fear, which further reinforces the mobilisation.

Letting the breath move lower again signals to your nervous system you don’t need to escape. Over time, allowing this lower, steadier breathing to become familiar gives your body easier access to its natural settling response.

3. Mindfulness 

Working with a hypnotherapist who understands mindfulness and nervous-system regulation can help you develop a steadier relationship with your attention. Rather than trying to control your thoughts, you begin to notice them without being pulled along by them.

As your awareness strengthens, you are less likely to be automatically mobilised by every worry or imagined scenario. The nervous system does not need to enter a full survival response each time a thought appears.

In sessions, we practise staying with internal experience in a way that feels safe and voluntary. Over time, this supports your system to settle more easily, even when life feels uncertain.

4. Meditation 

Meditation creates conditions that support internal settling. When you sit and bring gentle attention to your breath, sensations or surroundings, you reduce external stimulation and allow motivator hormones to quieten. As the system settles, your heart rate often slows naturally.

Meditation gives your nervous system regular moments where it does not need to mobilise.

Practised consistently, even for a few minutes, meditation can become a daily signal of safety. Five minutes of intentional settling is enough to remind the body of its default rhythm. Over time, this familiarity makes it easier to access calm when you need it.

In sessions, we often explore forms of focused attention that feel natural to you. Clients sometimes arrive saying they “can’t meditate” because their mind is busy. We approach it differently so it becomes an experience of steady presence rather than another challenge.

5. Movement 

Movement supports your nervous system in a very direct way. When motivator hormones are active, your body prepares for action. If that action never comes, the mobilisation can linger. Gentle, regular movement helps complete that cycle.

There is no need for intensity. Your body evolved for steady, functional movement across the day rather than short bursts of extreme effort. A 30-minute walk, especially outdoors and in natural light, gives your system an opportunity to use the energy waiting to go.

As you move, your breathing deepens, your muscles engage and release, and gratifying hormones follow. The heart rate rises appropriately and then settles again so you complete the stress cycle.

How to stop heart palpitations due to anxiety

Hypnotherapy or another form of talking therapy will help you understand why your nervous system is mobilising in the first place. But in the moment, when your heart is racing, you want to know how to help your body settle.

If your heart is beating fast because motivator hormones are active, your system is in mobilisation. The simplest way to support settling is through your breath. When you inhale, your heart rate naturally increases slightly. When you exhale, it decreases. This is a normal biological rhythm. A longer out-breath gently stimulates the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system, the part responsible for slowing the heart and supporting recovery.

Rather than trying to force your heart to calm down, you can give your body a signal that it is safe to stand down. You might inhale gently to a steady count of seven, then exhale to a slightly longer count, perhaps eleven. The exact numbers matter less than the relationship between them. The out-breath is simply longer than the in-breath. This is not stopping anxiety; it is simply slowing one of the symptoms.

Over time, in therapy, we can explore what your body is mobilising for and whether it is asking you to meet a survival need. 

How to slow down heart rate anxiety

Anxiety often causes anxiety. For example, the faint feeling of anxiety can frighten you so much that your anxiety grows, and everything feels much stronger.

Heart rate anxiety happens when your slightly faster heartbeat makes you fear there is something terribly wrong. Your brain takes this belief on and strengthens the response. The fast heart rate gets stronger, and you find yourself in a vicious circle. When you make the active decision to use one of the above techniques to slow down your heart rate, you will also help lower heart rate anxiety.

Slowing your heart rate when you feel anxious is easier when you understand what it is doing and why. A racing heart is usually a sign that motivator hormones are active and your system is preparing you to meet a need or respond to a threat. The techniques above help your body access its natural settling response in the moment. They give your nervous system the signal that it can stand down.

Over time, deeper work in hypnotherapy sessions can help you hear the messages from your body. What survival need might it be? Where is completion missing? When you understand the rhythm between mobilisation and settling, your heart becomes information.